The Challenge

The proliferation of IT centric, disk based storage technologies in rich media applications has done wonders for lowering costs and improving storage densities. However, in media centric operations many of these technologies have specific advantages and disadvantages. The desire for high performance, scalable digital media storage presents significant challenges for content owners. The need for easy and fast access to content encoded in different formats, bitrates and the need for collaborative shared access to this content can create critical bottlenecks at the storage subsystem level. The desire for storage capacity amongst content owners is near insatiable, but performance is arguably a more significant factor which also needs to scale without an associated increase in storage costs. The dream is a combination of fast, scalable and

inexpensive media centric storage. DIVAgrid is the solution!

 

DIVAgrid leverages the proven highly distributed architecture of our DIVArchive Content Storage Management solution to provide vast, scalable, load balanced and inexpensive media centric storage. Instead of relying on a single shared nearline storage array (using either a SAN or NAS technology), a network of interconnected distributed “DIVAgrid Actors” can scale incrementally to deliver higher performance, connectivity and improved reliability for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. Each DIVAgrid Actor is built on a DIVArchive high bandwidth content movement engine platform and contains performance RAID protected storage. These DIVAgrid Actors can optionally be paired with in path content  transcoding engine (becoming “DIVAgrid Actor/Transcoders”).

 

Link download for PDF file

http://www.mediafire.com/download/mjftmbbs5gw6irj/DIVAgrid_Brochure_Letter.pdf

DIVAgrid Actor physical storage arrays can be combined to form one or more DIVAgrid Virtual Arrays available for content aware functions such as archive, restore, timecode based partial restore and transcoding. Because of this abstraction layer, capacities can be incrementally scaled and intelligently managed by DIVArchive in a load balanced fashion providing near limitless storage and bandwidth capabilities.

 

Incrementally adding network attached DIVAgrid Actor or DIVAgrid Actor/Transcoder servers provides an associated increase in overall

system bandwidth as well as grid based storage capacity.

 

Because of its advanced content aware features, multiple content copies (DIVArchive Object instances) can be automatically created across DIVAgrid Actors providing redundant access and high availability in case of a component, server or disk failure.

Content replication is either:

• On Demand: Controlling applications can request replication for valuable or highly desired content across DIVAgrid Actors.

• Automatic: Dynamic content lifecycle policies can be defined within DIVArchive which define content-aware DIVAgrid Actor replication factors.

 

Applying advanced DIVArchive load-balancing techniques to the available content-aware functions, DIVAgrid Actors and DIVArchive Actor/Transcoders offers consistent performance for the entire Content Storage Management system. Content replication allows also a faster access to highly demanded content in addition to the obvious protection benefits.

 

DIVArchive configuration and control utilities provide a single level of setup and monitoring across all DIVAgrid Actors, DIVAgrid Actor/Transcoders and Arrays.